By M.Sc Ana Luisa Guzmán H.
Director of CCLVF
Human beings are inevitably exposed to pain. All of us, due to different circumstances and at different times in our lives, have experienced losses that have affected us in different ways and intensities.
The pandemic highlighted the importance of looking at the mental health of all people and giving it attention as part of our well-being.
There is no doubt that the loss of a loved one is one of the most painful and unavoidable experiences in life, and people are hardly prepared to cope with it. We experience feelings of helplessness, frustration, deep sadness and, in many cases, existential voids, to which we must pay attention in a timely manner to prevent severe depression and risky behaviors, such as suicidal ideation.
In such difficult moments we can fall into “meaninglessness”, as Dr. Viktor Frankl, creator of logotherapy, put it; pure and simple, we do not understand what is happening to us, but we feel, in many cases, a gap that “hurts”. If we do not attend to what we feel, it can affect our ability to live a healthy life, in well-being and balance; therefore, it is necessary to seek the help of a professional person to accompany us in the process of mourning and / or recovery from loss, it is worth nothing that the meaning of “recovery”, only the person who has lived the loss of that loved one can respond in the course and step by step of their bereavement experience.
The approach to emotional loss must be comprehensive. It is essential to work on the mental health of the person, his or her emotional, physical, psychological, and social well-being, especially when we face the conditioning factors of life, which come suddenly as an unexpected death. Such determining factors affect the way we think, feel and act, how we handle daily concerns, how we relate to other people and make decisions. Mental health is important in all stages and areas of life.
Mental health helps us to integrate in all our dimensions and a deep pain such as the one caused by an emotional loss destroys us, “tears us to pieces”, and after that, how do we put those pieces back together again? The most important thing is to ask for help so that mental health professionals can accompany us in the management of the grieving process and in our path towards meaning and transcendence. A professional person can accompany us in our passage through the tragic triad: suffering, death and guilt, which is lived starkly in the grief, and that in the logotherapy includes the analysis of:
· Emotional self-distancing
· Self-awareness
· Self-transcendence
· Freedom
· Responsibility
· Meaning of life.
“Grief is not solely and exclusively a feeling, for grief lies deep in the heart, in the spiritual and mental center of the person, it is the knowledge of a valuable loss. There is nothing that can erase that knowledge, there is nothing that can undo that loss”. Elizabeth Lukas, Austrian clinical psychologist and specialist in logotherapy
What is logotherapy? It is a therapy that helps human beings to regain or rediscover their love for life and for their existence and allows them to discover the capacity of humans to overcome the most difficult conditioning if they have a reason for it.
